Tag: Vegetation

Land cover and land use have great impacts on water resources, as they affect how precipitation translates into runoff, infiltration, evaporation, and the quality of the water (Hirji
et al. 2002). Almost 75 per cent of ...

Feedback refers to the modification of a process by changes resulting from the process itself. Positive feedbacks accelerate the process, while negative feedbacks slow it down. Part of the uncertainty around future clima...

Warming is widespread, generally greater over land than over oceans, and the largest gains in temperatures for the planet are over the North American Arctic, north central Siberia, and on the Antarctic Peninsula. These r...

In an effort to bring back life to the degraded and over-used lands of the poor Shinyanga region of Tanzania, the government has brought back the traditional practice of Ngitili. Vegetation and trees are nurtured in encl...

Large tropical hydropower reservoirs in Latin America may have a potential adverse impact on the climatic system through releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Submerging large areas of land and tropical vegetat...

Carbon stocks in forest areas comprise
carbon in living and dead organic
matter both above and below ground
including trees, the understorey, dead
wood, litter and soil. On a global scale,
vegetation and soils are e...

The Ok Tedi mine is located high in the rain forest covered Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea. Prior to 1981 the local Wopkaimin people lived a subsistence existence in one of the most isolated places on earth. That was...

The Mesopotamian marshlands in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins were devastated by damming and river channelisation during the late 1980s. This graphic illustrates the decline in the area's marshlands by comparing t...

Straddling the borders of Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon in West Africa, Lake Chad has been a source of freshwater for irrigation projects in all these countries. This graphic traces the shrinkage of Lake Chad and cha...

The Arctic region has varying levels of protected areas that correspond to different vegetation zones. This is from a report by Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), Habitat Conservation Report No. 2.

Distribution of major vegetation zones and level of protection in the Arctic is shown based on the percentage of area covered. This is part of a report by the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF).

The figure shows a comparison of current vegetation zones at a hypothetical dry temperate mountain site with simulated vegetation zones under a climate-warming scenario. Mountains cover about 20% of the Earth's continent...

Carbon is the basis of all organic substances, from fossil fuels to human cells. On Earth, carbon is continually on the move – cycling through living things, the land, ocean, atmosphere. What happens when humans start dr...

The impact of infrastructure development on reindeer potentially threatens the cultural traditions of the Barents region indigenous people and their chosen way of life. The probability of impact on wildlife, vegetation a...

Snow and the various forms of ice - the cryosphere - play different roles within the climate system. The two continental ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland actively influence the global climate over time scales of mi...

Warming is widespread, generally greater over land than over oceans, and the largest gains in temperatures for the planet are over the North American Arctic, north central Siberia, and on the Antarctic Peninsula. These r...

Poor people all over Africa are vulnerable to droughts and floods since many depend on rainfed agriculture as their main means of subsistence and often live in degraded areas susceptible to rainfall variation (cleared of...

In 1970s and 1980s - years of environmental crisis, there were few trees remaining in Niger. Wind-blown sands razed farmers' young crops and they often had to plant crops three times to succeed. Since the middle of the 1...